Color Terms (Re: Cherokee term for 'china clay')

[Rankin, Robert L]

You might want to go back to the 20's or 30's and read Sapir's article on size/sound symbolism in one of the psychology journals; I don't have the ref. right now.  Stanley Newman may have had a similar article, and some of Greenberg's typology students have written about it in the Stanford Working Papers on Linguistic Universals back in the '70's or '80's.  Basically higher, fronter vocoids were associated with 'small, angular, feminine, etc.' while lower, backer vowels were associated with 'blunt, large, masc., etc.' pretty much worldwide.  Consonants share these semantic associations with acute consonants giving the 'sharp, bright, small, feminine' readings and grave consonants the opposed affective meanings.  It's interesting stuff.  Of course such things have been known, more or less, since the time of Aristotle and gave rise to the natural vs. conventional theories of language in ancient times.  It doesn't pay to take it to extremes, but these are interesting phonological/psychological properties.
 
Bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson
Sent: Mon 7/17/2006 3:09 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Color Terms (Re: Cherokee term for 'china clay')



Mary wrote:
> I haven't been following this discussion very closely, so maybe somebody
has already pointed this out, but there is a closely similar process in
Cree (and maybe other Algonquian languages?) - t palatalized to c occurs in

diminutive word-formation; e.g. atim 'dog', acimosis 'puppy'.  This is also

a feature of "compassionate" speech, when one is speaking to a sick child,
or such.

Interesting!  I wonder how widespread this process is in North America.
Does Dakotan also have it?

Rory